a.d.venturer writes: "Elite, the Metroid series, Dungeon Siege, God of War I and II, Half-Life (but not Half-Life 2), Shadow of the Colossus, the Grand Theft Auto series; some of the best games ever (and Dungeon Siege) have done away with the level mechanic and created uninterrupted game spaces devoid of loading screens and artificial breaks between periods of play. Much like cut scenes, level loads are anathema to enjoyment of game play, and a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes. So in this era of multi-megabyte and gigabyte memory and fast access storage devices why do we continue to have games that are dominated by the level structure, be they commercial (Portal, Team Fortress 2), independent (Darwinia) and amateur (Nethack, Angband)? Why do games still have levels?"

aluminumangel writes: "I'm ecstatic over the news that Disney is back to producing shorts in good-old fashioned 2D cell animation. One of the first shorts to debut this fall is Goofy in "How to Hook Up Your Home Theater." Yes, a return to the classic "how to..." series! Remember when Goofy (or multiple Goofies) would attempt a sport or pastime — with a dead-pan/throat-clearing/stuffy narrator providing instruction? It is back! We could see Goofy try to figure out 1080i vs. 1080p and component cables vs. HDMI cables... will he choose plasma or LCD? I don't know, but Goofy seems more like a LCoS guy to me. I can't wait until Goofy demos his new room! Let me venture a guess and say that Goofy will choose Blu-ray over HD-DVD."

norminator writes: Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA for 38 years, passed away this afternoon in his home. Valenti is known among the Slashdot community as a man who did not believe in fair use, including backing up your digital media. From a Slashdot article four years ago: "In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless."

An anonymous reader writes: The authors of the Vista "boot-time rootkit" VBootkit had been interviewed by SecurityFocus and presented their tool as a brand-new research, but it seems they've got their inspiration elsewhere and somehow forgot to mention it.
Dave Korn does a little research which points to the two-years-old BootRoot project by Derek Soeder and Ryan Permeh of eEye security.

It's transparently obvious that these self-publicising
clowns have used IDA to disassemble BootRoot (Guys! Didn't you know it comes
with source? How dumb are you?), and have crudely hacked out the very very
clever ndis-patching backdoor payload written by Derek and Ryan and replaced
it with their own crappy amateurish functionality.

mu22le writes: "Last week at linux.conf.au Andrew Tannenbaum presented his vision of an operating system that never crashes and introduced his new metric: LFs, Lifetime Failures, to describe the number of times software has crashed in a user's lifetime. More details can be found in this interview."

An anonymous reader writes: The newly introduced Extended Validation SSL Certificates do not help users to detect phishing attacks, according to a study by Stanford University and Microsoft Research [PDF]. The study illustrates that the new Internet Explorer 7 interface, which features a green address bar to indicate EV certs, is easy for phishers to spoof. Training users does not help- those who read the IE7 documentation are more likely to classify real and phishing sites as legitimate. The authors will present their results at the Usable Security 2007 conference.